Saturday, September 19, 2009

Beck on Marriage and the PATRIOT Act

Here's Glenn Beck on marriage:

"I don't have a problem with civil marriages. I don't understand how anyone could think it's right that, I've got somebody who I've been living with my whole life, we're like a married couple, and I can't go in -- they're dying, or they're in the hospital and they were in a car accident -- I can't go in? Excuse me? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. There has to be some common sense. Now if somebody chooses to live their life a different way, that's their choice. But that doesn't mean that we minimize or equate somebody else's choice in the other direction. It's OK, it's OK. The problem really comes in to: if you start changing the definition of one thing, you can't open the door just a little bit. Let's say you're for gay marriage -- OK, great, put it in there. Now you're just defining it that wide. You've opened the door. It doesn't make any sense to not open the door all the way for anybody that wants to define it between any consenting adult [sic]. You can make the case, no, not about children. You can kind of make the case with brothers and sisters, but not if they're both fixed. You can make the case against animals. But you can't make it about intelligent consenting adults. You can't. Now if you're prepared to open that door all the way, that's fine. But other than that, your logic doesn't work. You have to open it all the way, or not at all." [Beck had minutes earlier mentioned that brothers and sisters produce genetic abnormalities, and that animals can't consent.]

Here's Glenn Beck on the PATRIOT Act:

"The PATRIOT Act, the PATRIOT Act just by name alone should have been a warning sign. In the PATRIOT Act there are things that we I believe need to allow the federal government to do for a limited time only and in a very limited scope and I was satisfied by the Sunset provision in the PATRIOT Act. However I'm growing more and more leery of that and that's not because of the Obama administration. That is because of my view on the government and how out of control they are in the last couple of years where I don't -- I no longer trust the government. I think there are -- I think there are a lot of good people in government that are in there fighting, but I also believe with an emergency and an awful lot of power, unscrupulous people can use them in unscrupulous ways."

He's still not libertarian enough to be the LP nominee, but the more I fact-check the hyperbolic criticisms of this guy, the better he sounds.